This sums it up nicely:
"With none of EA's major spring slate headed to Wii U and just the delayed port of Need for Speed: Most Wanted still left on the horizon, the unprecedented relationship was very much on the rocks. EA cemented the break-up with its next announcement: that its upcoming major wave of games would run on DICE's Frostbite 3 engine, which it claimed was not Wii U-compatible. The framework will be used in 15 upcoming titles, including Battlefield 4, Need for Speed: Rivals, Mass Effect 4, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Mirror's Edge and its unannounced Star Wars games. Wii U will miss out on them all.
By way of explanation, DICE technical director Johan Andersson claimed via Twitter that "FB3 has never been running on Wii U. We did some tests with not too promising results with FB2 and chose not to go down that path." Would EA now have the same technical problems with Frostbite on Wii U had the console been selling like hot cakes? Or was EA simply eyeing a less-than-spectacular return on Wii U releases? "It's both," Patrick Bach, executive producer of Battlefield at DICE told Eurogamer.
"If the Wii U was immensely popular we would probably put more focus into seeing how we could mitigate this, because it is a technical problem," Bach said. "It is a technical problem at its core because the Frostbite engine is not designed to run on that hardware, and the hardware is quite different from the next-gen consoles and the previous gen consoles."
But the Wii U is at least as powerful as current generation consoles and Frostbite 3 is designed to be scalable - we'll see current-gen versions of Battlefield 4, for example. With Frostbite 2 appearing to work on Wii U fine, does the argument about having technical difficulties really still stand up?
"From our perspective it's not as powerful as it should be to be able to run a Battlefield game," Bach responded. "Straight out of the box, as in Frostbite 3, it doesn't run that well on the Wii U, which means it takes a lot of time and energy from us that would then take from something else.
"So, we made the decision to say, no, let's not take away the focus from the PlayStations and the Xboxes and the PCs to do this. At the end of the day it's about focus and priorities. If we could press a button to move it over to Wii U, of course we could make a Wii U SKU, but it would take some substantial time to do it. I know some fans get very upset when we say that, but it's true. There's a reason why not all games are on the Wii U platform."
And again, should Nintendo turn around Wii U's fortunes, DICE is open to returning to the platform, Bach concluded.
"Absolutely. Of course. There's no reason why we couldn't focus down and make a Nintendo GameBoy version of it as well. It's all about where you put your focus and how you scale things. Where do you scale down? Where do you put your team efforts?
"We need to do what is right for the franchise and what feels right in our gut. If you have to scale your game down in the wrong places too much, then you lose some of the core values of what your game stands for. It's complicated. It's more complicated than people would like it to be. I would love for us to be able to be on Samsung TVs as well, but we have to draw the line somewhere."
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-06-26-ea-and-nintendo-the-collapse-of-the-unprecedented-relationship
